guessMIMEType function

Infer the MIME type from a file name

This function returns the MIME type, i.e. part of the value used in the Content-Type for an HTTP request/response or in email to identify the nature of the content. This is a string such as "text/plain" or "text/xml" or "image/png".

The function consults an R object constructed by reading a Web site of known MIME types (not necessarily all) and matching the extension of the file name to the names of that table.

guessMIMEType(name, default = NA)

Arguments

• name: character vector of file names
• default: the value to use if no MIME type is found in the table for the given file name/extension.

Returns

A character vector giving the MIME types for each element of name.

References

The table of MIME types and extensions was programmatically extracted from http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/mime-types.shtml with tbls =readHTMLTable("http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/mime-types.shtml") tmp= tbls[[1]][-1,] mimeTypeExtensions = structure(as.character(tmp[[2]]),names = gsub("^\.", "", tmp[[1]])) save(mimeTypeExtensions, file ="data/mimeTypeExtensions.rda")

The IANA list is not as convenient to programmatically compile.

Author(s)

Duncan Temple Lang

See Also

Uploading file.

Examples

guessMIMEType(c("foo.txt", "foo.png", "foo.jpeg", "foo.Z", "foo.R"))

 guessMIMEType("foo.bob")
 guessMIMEType("foo.bob", "application/x-binary")